You really don’t see something … strange … about the fact that you take a tweet from one BBC journalist about what an Israeli Police Press minister is said to have said as gospel truth, but take a Reuter’s report about a top Hamas leader’s statement as “so-called” and “we don’t know if he said what he’s supposed to have said”?
The “so-called Hamas leader”, Saleh al-Arouri, is widely known as the founder of and a leader of Qassam Brigade.
FWIW here is more mainstream reporting about what he said.
Is he blowing smoke? Maybe. Posturing is important.
Not to get off topic, but the only people praising Ha’aretz for even-handedness are those on the political left. You certainly won’t find anyone in the political center or right praising Ha’aretz for much of anything.
Its been a while now and the death toll is something like 2100 Palestinians vs 70 Israelis. Seems pretty one sided unless you consider that the Palestinians and the Israelis have already set a price on Palestinian lives in their most recent successful negotiation. The recent prisoner exchange puts the value of a Palestinian at 0.001 Israeli. No wonder that Israel has to respond with retaliation several orders of magnitude over what the Palestinians can muster.
I won’t dispute many Israeli right-wingers don’t like it just like many American right-wingers whine about the New York Times or the Washington Post but that does nothing to support Blindyboard’s ridiculous assertion that Ha’aretz is famously apologist regarding Israel.
Any Palestinian dead count as “innocent civilians killed by evil Israelis”. Including the executed ones, the ones killed by 400 or so Hamas rockets that fell inside Gaza, the ones killed in traffic incidents or of some disease in hospitals. Anything to bulk up the numbers.
It might be too much for one book. I would settle for a book that gives a chronological account of all relevant facts with an explanation of why those facts are relevant. I would think that people on both sides of the argument could agree on the facts and then make argument as to why those facts are (or are not) relevant.
So much of this argument seems to be people throwing factoids at each other in an effort to diminish the import of some other factoid.